Her reaction to that? Oh yes. She would probably have to restrain her gag reflex.
It was best if she thought of him as a disorganized and flighty actor who couldn’t be bothered to uphold his engagements and commitments. If she knew the truth, she’d recoil from him completely, and that was a pain that Moreau had no interest in acquainting himself with. A prickly and stand-offish Geo was infinitely better than no Geo at all.
Ignoring her question, Moreau tossed the duffel over his back and raised his eyebrows at her. “Shall we go? Or would you prefer to keep berating your highest paying client?”
She narrowed her eyes at him but turned on her heel, giving him an unimpeded view of her incredible backside.
Like all the other Rook Securities personnel, Geo was required to wear a white button down and black slacks. But not even supremely boring clothing could hide the body that she was rocking underneath. This woman was built like Lara Croft. Long legs and toned arms with enough ass to make a man lose the way back home. And Moreau didn’t even let himself think about her chest. If he started, he wouldn’t stop. Sometimes he lost hours imagining her naked.
He’d also found that when he was nervous or uncomfortable, imagining Geo in her pajamas, of any kind, immediately soothed him. It sounded perverted, but most of the time, in his imagination, she was fully clothed. He just liked to imagine what she looked like when she was relaxed and sleepy. Since it was something he’d never seen before.
He’d only ever seen her dressed for work and he’d only ever seen her alert and at the top of her game. He’d known her for almost four years and he’d never once seen her yawn or cry. Every once in a while, Atlas—one of the other bodyguards employed by Rook Securities—could make her laugh or smile. It made Moreau as irrationally jealous as it made him happy. He loved to see her smile. He just hated that he was never the one to make it happen.
He imagined Geo eating oysters, swimming in a murky pond, shaving her legs, doing dishes. He imagined her lacing up ballet shoes, catching a frisbee, putting a star at the top of a Christmas tree. He imagined her making her bed. He imagined her bed. He imagined her in her bed, tucked in for the night. Would she sleep on her side? On her back? Covered in down pillows and dead to the world?
He imagined her all the ways he’d never seen her before. Doing all the things he’d never done with her. And whenever he found himself wishing that he could do those things with her, he just imagined a new thing, giving it every illustrious detail he could think. All the way down to the buttons on her plaid pajamas.
He’d known her long enough to know that his imagination was the only place that he’d ever get to have Savannah Georgia. She was as uninterested in him as any woman could be. To her, Moreau was a duty. And an irksome one at that.
He followed her out of the room and took one last indulgent look around before he gently closed the door. He loved that room.
It was ridiculous how partial he was to the room considering how plain the accommodations were here at the Rook Securities bunker. The room he occupied when he was here was in the crow’s nest of the renovated warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Sure, there was an often sunny, partial view of the Statue of Liberty and the East River. But the room was drafty and the furnishings simple. It was nothing compared to his place in LA or the fancy hotels where he often stayed when he was traveling for a shoot.
Even so, his plain little room in nowhere, Brooklyn remained his favorite place on earth. It bothered him to no end that when he was elsewhere in the world, Rook allowed other clients to stay in those quarters. But Javier Rook was more than just the head of Moreau’s New York security, over the years, he’d become Moreau’s friend. And Moreau understood that Rook had a business to run. Moreau would never get in the way of that just to throw a tantrum over his own preferences.
No matter what Geo thought, Moreau was not a self-centered, spoiled actor who demanded to get his own way. Case in point: he’d wanted Geo for years and had never even come close to having her.
He followed her down the stairs of the crow’s nest and to the central building, which consisted of four floors that all looked down onto a central atrium. The bunker was extremely secure, with all sorts of state-of-the-art security features that Moreau was glad someone else understood. He couldn’t explain even a fraction of the things that Rook and his team did to ensure his safety and preserve his privacy when he was here at the bunker, but he was certainly grateful for it.
He knew that most of their clients chose to maintain private residences and just employed Rook for the bodyguarding services. But soon after he’d first stayed at the bunker, Moreau had sold his New York residence in Chelsea, choosing instead to crash at the bunker whenever he was in town. It was much more secure and came with the added benefit of having Geo on tap. This way, he got to see her every single day that he was in New York City.
Now he was about to board a plane and fly across the country, where his LA-based security team would take over.
It would be four months before he was back here.
He watched as Geo, moving at a faster clip than he was, turned a corner and disappeared. He used to entertain daydreams about getting her number, texting her while he was away, just a little something to tide him over. But not anymore. He’d long-since given up that hope.
“Davy!”
Moreau stopped on his heels and turned to face back the way he’d come. One of the two identical twins that Rook employed was running toward him. Because there was a smile on the man’s face, Moreau correctly assumed that it was Atlas and not Sequence.
“Sequence made a snack for you!” Atlas called as he jogged up to meet Moreau. The twins were quite strange to Moreau, who had never completely figured them out. Sequence was deadly quiet and eternally frowny, but he seemed to take severe pride in keeping everyone in the bunker well-fed. Atlas, on the other hand, was smiley and jokey and silly, but he took his job as a bodyguard extremely seriously. Just a few months ago, he’d taken a bullet for a client. Well, a client who was actually his girlfriend.
“Ah. Thank you to Sequence,” Moreau said, reaching for the brown paper bag in Atlas’s hand.
“It’s gonna be a long stretch until we see you again, huh?” Atlas asked.
“I must be mistaken, but you seem a bit melancholy, my friend,” Moreau said with a slight smile.
“Of course I’m sad!” Atlas replied candidly, scratching a hand over his blonde, lengthy beard. “I love when you’re our main client, man. Whenever you’re gone, we fill our schedule with rich pricks who go out of their way to do dumb, dangerous shit.”
Moreau frowned. He’d heard the others mildly complain about their other clients before, but it hadn’t occurred to Moreau that they were dangerous. It hadn’t occurred to him that Geo was in danger when he wasn’t around.
“Perhaps I should speak with Rook about this,” he said, almost to himself.
Atlas laughed and clapped him on the back. “Sure, you do that. I don’t think even his favorite client could talk him into running his business any differently. Anyhoo, I gotta run. But travel safe, man, and we’ll see you around Christmas, right?”
“Just after.”
It would mean yet another lonely LA Christmas, but no matter how much he wanted to, Moreau wouldn’t force the members of Rook Securities to work through the holidays.
“Davy! Jesus! Do I have to carry you out of here?”
Moreau sucked in his smile and by the time he’d turned back around to Geo, there was an imperious scowl on his face. “I did not realize that was an option.” He turned back to Atlas. “So long, and thank your brother for my meal. Also, please say goodbye to Swift for me.”
Cedric Swift was the final member of Rook Securities and easily Moreau’s favorite—besides Geo, of course. Cedric was a calming presence, and he was really freaking good at his job. Everyone just sort of felt better when Cedric was around. His fiancée too. Elena. Now there was a good woman. Moreau had long-admired their relationship.
Moreau turned and followed Geo out to the atrium where she sat in the driver’s seat of an idling SUV. He frowned.
He tossed his bag into the back seat and pulled himself into the passenger side, slamming the door. “I think you must choose this monstrosity simply to piss me off. I know you care about the environment as much as I do. Why not drive me in one of Rook’s electric vehicles?”
She rolled her eyes. “You didn’t care about the environment until Elena made you care about the environment, same as me. So get off your high horse. And none of our electric cars have bulletproof glass.”
He batted his eyelashes at her as she pulled through the gates and started navigating toward the airport. “And who, pray tell, is going to be shooting at me?”
She shrugged. “You’re the one who’s hired a security team.”
He laughed, because she was utterly incorrigible. Only Geo would treat him like he was being paranoid for employing security when he was one of the most famous and richest people in the entire world.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and the smile melted off of Moreau’s face.
Him. It was the mysterious Him that had appeared in Geo’s life about two and a half years ago. Coincidentally right about the time that Moreau had realized that he needed to tell Geo about his feelings for her. That they’d grown too strong to ignore any longer.
He’d never forget the first day he’d seen her answer a text from Him. She’d pulled her phone from her pocket and smiled so sweetly at the message. He’d known it was from a man. And he’d known, without a doubt, that she had feelings for this man.
Little comments over the years had slowly built the case.
“Do you need to get that?” Moreau asked, a quiet politeness in his tone that belied the sickly sweet venom that had started roiling in his gut.
“He can wait,” she replied, switching lanes. “He knows I’m at work.”
Moreau closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the headrest. He refused to ask who He was. Just like every time she brought Him up. He opened his eyes to watch the city roll past him. He wanted to slow the car ride down.
“Do you have to get that?” she asked him pointedly. He hadn’t even noticed his own phone buzzing in his pocket.
“Probably,” he frowned. “I’m sure it is my management team, chomping at the bite to get me back online.” He was very clear with everyone on his team that when he was in New York, they were only to contact him if it was an emergency. His time at the bunker was defined by peace and solitude, and when he could make himself, writing. But they knew he was about to fly back to LA and he was sure they would blow up his phone the entire way there.
“Bit.”
“Hmm?” He pulled his attention from the scenery and allowed himself a good long look at Geo’s profile. Her long, shiny hair was pulled back into a bun, the way it always was, and the evening sun turned her golden skin peach. She had high, proud cheek bones, a pointed little chin, dark eyes and strong eyebrows. If he hadn’t spent three quarters of his life in Hollywood, he might have thought her lips had fillers. But he knew that no doctor was that good. Her lush mouth was all hers, all natural. Surprisingly, it wasn’t her lips or eyes that really wrecked him. It was her nose. Her cute, little ski-jump nose. Nothing about her could be described as cute except for that nose of hers. He wanted to nuzzle that nose, tuck it into bed, buy it slippers for Christmas.
Her strange non-sequitur filtered back through his brain. “Who have you bitten?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “No one. Recently. No, I was correcting you. You said ‘chomping at the bite’. It’s chomping at the bit.”
Moreau frowned. Though he’d been born in France and French was his first language, he’d lived on every livable continent and was fluent in five languages. He’d lived in the United States for the most considerable length of time, but even still, English with its idioms got the best of him occasionally.
“But this makes no sense,” he insisted in his light, worldly accent. With the passage of time, it had not remained a pure French accent, but a mixture of all the places he’d ever lived and all the languages he spoke. He could change his accent at will, if a part called for it, but when he was relaxed, he always lapsed back into his natural lilt. “It mixes present and past tense.”
“No. Bit is a noun in this case. Not a verb. A bit is that metal thing that goes in a horse’s mouth.”
“Ah.” He reflected. “Chomping at the bite,” he murmured to himself. “Chomping at the bit.” He nodded. “Yes. I see.”
He turned his face toward the passenger window again and tried out the phrase in a Texas accent. “Chomping at the bit,” he drawled. He tried it again in a Scottish accent. And then a Russian one. It was just something he did sometimes. He did it to stay sharp and because he was good at it.
Geo side-eyed him. “Prepping for a role?”
He shook his head. “Just playing. My next role requires a California accent.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You playing a surfer again?”
His eyebrows jumped. It both delighted and surprised him that she knew he’d played a surfer in a movie once. Not that it was a secret. The movie had been an international blockbuster and billboards had been plastered all over New York City for months. But still, she was normally so disinterested in him that he wouldn’t have been surprised if her brain had blocked it out on principle.
He shivered in mock aversion. “God no. Never again.”
She didn’t take the bait, so he filled in the blanks on his own.
“I’ll never film in the water again. I have never had more prunes in my life.”
She side-eyed him again. “You were pruney. You didn’t have prunes. Two different things.”
He tucked his smile in again. “Nevertheless. It was not for me. I was too paranoid of sharks the whole time.”
“You’re scared of sharks?”
“You’re not?”
She said nothing again and Moreau’s stomach dropped when she pulled into the airport. She flashed credentials at a security booth and then started the drive up to the private check point he’d have to go through in order to make it to his private jet.
“No,” he filled the silence. “This project I’m going back to LA to work on is a film I actually like. It will not be a blockbuster. It was written by a friend. A black comedy.”
“A comedy?” She rolled her head to one side as she put the SUV in park. “I can’t picture you being funny.”
The comment was so rude that Moreau couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Anytime his ego started to swell too much, he could count on Geo to bring him back to earth. “You will like this movie. I get beheaded.”
Her face quirked into an expression he couldn’t name. “Huh.”
“All right, Ms. Georgia.” He hated goodbyes with Geo. They were painful and he always found himself acting awkwardly. He drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “I will see you in four months, then.”
“Yeah.”
“Have a good Christmas.” He allowed himself a moment to imagine Geo making Christmas cookies. That evolved into Geo in a snowball fight, a red stocking cap on her silky, dark hair and oversized mittens on her hands.
“A little early for Seasons Greetings, but sure, Davy. You too.”
She pointedly unlocked the SUV. There was no other way for him to kill time. He could see his jet a hundred feet in the distance. He frowned.
She opened her door when he did and walked with him side by side to the security checkpoint. He handed his bag over to be rifled through and stood in a T to be scanned by the TSA agent. Even with a private jet and standing out on the tarmac, there were tests to pass at JFK. He would have preferred a private airfield but this was New York. JFK was more convenient by a mile.
; His LA-based security team was waiting for him on the plane and they would already have performed whatever checks they needed to do in order to ensure his safety, so the moment that the TSA agent handed his bag back to him, Geo was free of duty.
He turned, and as he expected, she was already striding back to the SUV. He sighed and turned to the jet. He’d known she wouldn’t look back. It wasn’t her style.
***
Geo was halfway back to the Rook Securities bunker before she allowed her thoughts to circle back to Moreau. She could still smell his fancy shampoo inside the SUV so she put the windows down on the BQE. She didn’t need to drown herself in his scent. She shifted against the seat and turned on the radio, hoping to blare out her thoughts.
When Moreau was around, she was a locked chest at the bottom of the ocean. Nothing he said or did could open her up. But, disconcertingly, she’d started to get into the habit of thinking about Moreau after he’d left for LA. Not for long. But for a few hours after he left, she always felt a strange deflation that she couldn’t quite explain. She figured it was her body’s way of setting down her metaphorical weapons. Whenever Moreau was around, she felt as if she had her finger on the proverbial trigger. She was ready to strike at every moment. So, naturally, as soon as he was gone, she felt herself relax. But lately, the feeling bypassed relaxation and went firmly into something that felt like disappointment.
It was probably because fighting with Moreau Davy was the most stimulating thing in her life these days. For almost the last two years, Geo had been working herself into an early grave. She took any and every hour that Rook tossed her way, and thus, she found herself working damn near an 80-hour week.
And when she wasn’t working… well, that wasn’t particularly relaxing either. But it was where she was headed tonight.
She stopped back at the bunker to drop off the SUV and pick up her little Honda Accord. She’d downgraded from her Lexus two years ago in her endless search to make money out of thin air and she couldn’t complain too much. The Accord was good enough for her. Had a good safety rating and didn’t guzzle much gas.
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